Author: William Gallagher

High and Lowlands

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This image is a view of Lowlands University from “A Very Peculiar Practice” by Andrew Davies. The show is now on the BBC iPlayer to mark 40 years since its first transmission, which means it’s also four decades since I used to sit so very unhappily while facing exactly that view.

For while the show actually filmed in two different universities, the main one and the one with this view, was Birmingham University. I didn’t attend Birmingham University and while I’ve spoken there, I’ve presented panels there, that was all inconceivable on those cold days in the 1980s when I’d spend half an hour staring across at those buildings.

I suddenly think this sounds a bit Jude the Obscure, that I was sitting there longing to be in the university but that didn’t enter my head then, it didn’t enter my mind until this second. I sat there for the very deep reason that there was a bench. Just behind the bench, so just behind where the camera was for that shot, there’s a road which one beat later becomes a remarkably steep hill. At that time, every morning I would walk down that hill and every afternoon I’d walk back up it, unless I stopped to sit on that bench on the way home again and regret most of what was going on in between.

This might give you the measure of the day. Walking to work, going downhill, used to take me about half an hour. I think: I’m struggling to remember the figures now but I know the ratio. And so I think the walk home, going up this steep hill, took 15 minutes. I remember being shocked at that, at how I was clearly reluctant to go in the mornings, and also at how long it had taken me to notice. The day I realised was definitely a day to sit on that bench.

It was my first writing job. I was writing manuals for Apricot Computers and I lasted precisely, to the day, one year with them before I was able to get out. There were people I liked, there was a great on-site cook who made superb sausage sandwiches. But there were people I didn’t like and who did not like me. The one I remember was the Communications Manager and she was so foul to me that one day I actually laughed at something she was saying. It was a high point and a low point.

But then here’s a measure of the woman. She left on maternity leave — oh! ask me about contributing to presents — and when she had her baby, she sent a pretty fancy card to go on the work noticeboard announcing it. That’s nice. Except here is an English Communications Manager and she had this calligraphy card done entirely in French. I suddenly remember seeing it and jerking my head like, yeah, a person summarised by their own writing.

Presents, right, thanks. I was there for precisely one year, as I said, so unsurprisingly, every single person in that team had a birthday during my time. I want to say there were 12 people, something like that. Not sure now. But I do know that if I didn’t organise the card and cake or whatever it was, I certainly chipped in to all of them. Everyone was always nicely celebrated on their birthday, it was one of the good things that group did.

Yes. What you’re thinking, it’s yep. Every one in that group had their birthday celebrated except me.

There’s no possibility my birthday wasn’t known, that Communications Manager kept a list, I was just entirely ignored. It’s not as if I expect to be remembered when I’ve left a room — does that stem from this? — but I do now expect that on that particular day in that horrible year, I might have spent a while sitting there looking across at Lowlands University. I know I had this thing at the time that you can’t quit a job after only a short time, that it looks bad on your CV, and I also know that I couldn’t find anywhere else to go to. So I’d take the Communications Manager’s attitude, I’d eat those sausage sandwiches, and I’d sit on the bench.

I was going to say that I’d sit there wondering what to do. But actually I think more that it was how I just sat, in a space between work that was pressing down on me, and home where thanks, yes, it was a very good day, how was yours?

It seemed impossible that anything could change and yet here we are, none of this still on my mind until I caught that shot on “A Very Peculiar Practice”. Not to spoil the show, too, but it happens that this shot comes just as star Peter Davison’s character has reason to appreciate just being alive.

Now I do too.

Blake’s 1

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I can’t claim to have known actor Michael Keating, who died this week, but I did interview him once and we did have at least one phone chat. And I want to tell you about that chat. Not because of what was said, I imagine now that it was just about arranging the time for the in-person interview, but because of precisely when it happened.

Please picture me taking notes as I watched an episode of Blake’s 7. Specifically, I’m sitting at the end of our couch, my MacBook is on the arm to my side, my iPhone is on the seat next to me. Maybe I should explain that I thought I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, because this was for work and the episode was not exactly one of the good ones. I was watching it for completeness, possibly to check some fact, I can’t remember, but this was a job and I would have sworn that my mind kept wandering.

Except there came this moment when Vila, played by Keating, has to exit the scene. From my perspective on my couch, he walks out of shot to the right of my MacBook’s screen —

— and calls the iPhone beside me.

It was precise, to the instant, as if the character had really gone off to do it. And I must’ve been a lot more into that episode than I thought because I was really thrown by the call.

Compare that to how the star of Blake’s 7, Gareth Thomas, clearly decided during a phone call that I was an idiot. He was right, actually, as I was trying all sorts of things to route that call through my Mac in order to record it, and with some exasperation he eventually suggested I just put it on speakerphone, turn up the volume, and record that.

I don’t think I ever phoned Paul Darrow, who played Avon, but I know when we met, he told me he was using me as an excuse for a fag break. We stood outside a studio, the wind making recording hard, the cold getting to me, and I can’t remember another word. Good thing I took notes.

Only, Gareth Thomas died in 2016, not more than a couple of years after I spoke to him. Paul Darrow died in 2019. Now Michael Keating has gone, too, and for some reason I’m most saddened by that. Nothing against Thomas or Darrow, but there was something so unassumingly likeable about Keating. And I can see his face lighting up as he told me that no, he didn’t mind talking about Blake’s 7 for the ten thousandth time, “I like talking about myself!”

There are interviewees you wish you’d never contacted, and there are ones where you have to grit your teeth to get through the recording, but then there are ones who are great for whatever you’re doing and there are ones who you just like. If you’ve interviewed actors, you know this: they are very good at being likeable because they’re very good at performing. Still, you can tell. And if Michael Keating was putting on a show for me that day all those years ago, he did it very well.

He wasn’t one of the Blake people I carried on talking to after the project was over, but now I rather wish he had been.

A muso bouche

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So I did this thing yesterday, I had a tune in my head, just ten notes or so, and for the first time in my life, I automatically went to my piano to try to work out what they were. Now, I failed, and now, I have not one thin clue how I thought I could do this since at present “Chopsticks” is beyond my grasp, but I tried. And most significantly to me, I went to the piano as automatically as I might to a keyboard to write on.

I concluded, briefly, that I am now a musician. I concluded, even more briefly, that I am a muso.

But clearly only a small one, so therefore a-muso-bouche.

Now, I thought of that phrase and I unquestionably hope to make you smile with it, but if it worked then I see that as a good line. If the gag didn’t amuse you, then I see it as a line I might work on. I promise you that I do not see it either way as being part of me, as your reaction being praise or criticism of me. The writing is the thing, the work is the thing, it isn’t me.

Yet two different people this week told me that I need praise and that shocked me. It upset me, actually, and I can’t really explain why since I don’t suppose there’s anyone who doesn’t like being praised. Need, though. Whyever this punched me, it was on that word. And two different people. Two independent sources, I can’t dismiss that.

I vow to you, as actually I vowed to them, that if you praise me, I do not believe you. I won’t call you a liar, I’ll just think you’re being nice. Whatever I do, I assume it’s either bad or it’s good enough, move on. I’ve had some incredible comments from people, even this week, but while I hope I take the compliments graciously, I recognise that I just know very kind people and I enjoy that I know them.

Need, though. Shook me. Felt like they don’t know me. Or maybe that I don’t.

Keeping it real

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So there’s this book idea, right, and I first pitched it in the 1990s but not only couldn’t get anywhere with it, someone else did. They got a book published on precisely the same non-fiction topic and all these years later, I still remember my first thought when I got it: they’ve queered the pitch for everyone else.

Flash forward to now and it’s not as if I’ve sold that book proposal, but I am close. Close enough that all reason and logic says the pitch is done and the contract should be on its way soon. But partly because of previous bruising, partly because an old friend taught me never to assume something is happening until it already has, I am not yet convinced.

But this means that for the first time I can remember, I’m in a rather detailed and protracted limbo. It’s not just waiting to see if this work happens, it is waiting to see if it happens but at the same time I’m already thirty hours into the research and I’m somewhere around 8,000 words into the book. That’s about 10% of what I expect the final count to be, so I’m in deep yet I’m also not.

At risk of jinxing this entire thing just by telling you, the reason I want to talk to you about this while completely neglecting to reveal what it’s all about, is this moment, this extended moment. This is now a real project, and it is not a real project yet, and I’m in this strange moment. All the writing I’ve done so far, all of the pitching, there is no difference between that and the writing I will do for the rest of the book, but it feels completely different because it’s become real.

Or possibly real. Do you know, it’s quite hard to type with crossed fingers?

I remember this from when I first got to write a “Doctor Who” for Big Finish: playtime is over, this is the real world now and people are waiting for you to write. If they ever doubted that you could or if they ever doubted your idea, they’re way beyond that now and there is the total and completely reasonable presumption that you will do it.

And you will. There’s no question about that. Whatever it takes, whether it’s hard or simple, you’re committed and you’re contracted, you will write what you said you will and you will deliver it when you said you would. So far on this book project I’ve been agreeing dates for various stages and then always delivering early, but it’s still that no one is questioning whether I can write this. They shouldn’t. We are now at the stage where it is not an issue of whether I can write, but whether what I’m writing about is worth reading.

But I do question it. That 10% I’ve done so far is easily the most fact-packed thing I have written in the last decade. It is saturated with detail and I do love this — the publisher called it skilfully done, so you tell me why I’m still not convinced this is going to happen — and not only wasn’t it hard, it was fantastic to do. So much of it was stuff I already knew so the job was wallowing in confirming all of that, then so much more involved an interview with a source which turned out to be such a treat. He told me a fact, right, that won’t come in until later in the book, and even then will only take exactly one single sentence to reveal, but it was something I did not know before and I am ecstatic to have found it out.

Yet I’ve hopefully got another 90% of that level of detail ahead of me. Well, around 90%: I went ahead and wrote another short chapter just for myself, just because I had the details, just because it meant if and when this really does go ahead the way I want, I will have something else already done, it will be already underway. Keeping going is easier than starting or restarting.

There is just such a cold-shower difference between writing when you want to sell something and then writing when you have sold it. I say this to you as someone who has been a full-time freelance writer since the 1990s, someone who tends to write and have published around two thirds of a million words per year. But I also say it to you as someone who has wanted to write this book since the 1970s.

Not even since the 1990s. The 1970s. Just about. This is tied tightly to the very reasons I became a writer at all.

Not that there’s ever been a project I didn’t care about. Even if it was something simple or even if it were something I didn’t really have any interest in but you’ve got to pay the mortgage, still I go through a little of all of this concern about it. But then there are just these few certain and very special projects that mean the world. Only to me, of course, I’d be telling you exactly what this one is if I could and if I thought you’d be as into it as I am. But still, it’s this big to me and right now it is this real.

Or it isn’t.

I’ll obviously be relieved when this goes ahead, but to be involved in something I thought of, I pitched, and which means so much to me that right this moment my stomach is in a bit of a knot, it’s wonderful. I hope you have the same thing, and I hope you have it all the time.

FAT table

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Nothing you ever learn is wasted, even if it’s originally trivia and over time becomes pointless. I’m not selling this very well. But I did a thing this week and without any conceivably connection to anything I happen to have picked up before, there was a connection and I’ve been fixating on it.

All I did was have a week off. Mostly. Actually, pretty close to entirely. And I quickly found myself having to check what day was which, I was quickly living at odd hours of the day. I had a bad night’s sleep early on in the week, so I just had a lie-in. Cooking for one is tedious and I’d keep putting that off, so I’d end up eating at even odder hours, which might have contributed to the sleeping.

But overall, I had this week, it was wide open, and the very first thing I thought of was a FAT table. That’s an example of RAS, the Redundant Acronym Syndrome, as the T in FAT is Table. Just as you don’t need to say “ISBN number” because the N is number. I only learned of RAS while thinking of how I wanted to talk to you about this, so thank you.

FAT is a File Allocation Table. I have not one thin clue whether this still exists, but back in the day, the FAT was an important part of storage. You’d get these spinning hard drives with their magnetic platters and they could store data, but they needed organising. If you know all this, you know that I’m either patronisingly simplifying everything or I’ve just plain forgotten most of it, but I thought of the FAT as a contents page, or maybe an index. Nobody cares. Except I found it interesting because of two aspects, starting with how if you erased an entire hard drives, you probably did no such thing. You erased the contents page.

This is how data can, or at least could, be recovered. It would all be still there, until it was overwritten, it’s just that without an entry in the FAT, you couldn’t find it.

Then, reaching further back into my head, there was a thing I thought about too much regarding how data was saved on these drives. Your documents were saved in blocks and there was a thing about the size of those blocks. If your documents was a single byte longer than the block, it was given two blocks. Which meant you can have a drive that was full, even though it wasn’t.

I do not know why that interests me so. Except this week, actually starting mid-morning last Friday, I had all this space ahead of me and while I’d plenty to do, it had no structure. And I floundered. It was nice floundering, I spent Saturday morning in a cinema entirely on my own — I saw the French film “Colours of Time” and relished it, but wish I’d had more Malteasers — and then wandering about in the sunshine, I liked not having to be anywhere.

But I had all these things to do and without a structure, I was worried that they wouldn’t get done. They didn’t get done. Not all of them, and not the various other things that came up as good things to get done at the same time. A lot did. A lot was good.

Yet so much wasn’t done. And I found that if I finished something but it took a minute or two over an hour, it was clearly now time for lunch.

I appear to need a FAT table in my life. And this is not a comment on how much pizza I ate.

I’ve been banned from TikTok

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It feels like a badge of honour. Years ago I was fired from ITV’s Crossroads, today I’ve been banned by TikTok. I’m a rebel. I’m dangerous. I’m bad. You thought you knew me, but this is a whole other side I’ve kept hidden. I know how to battle social media, and I’m just crazy enough to do it.

Okay, it’s more likely a server error, but still, I’m having to appeal the decision and everything.

All I do on TikTok, by the way, is post a version of the short tip videos I make for my 58keys YouTube channel, 10- and 20-second pieces on how to do this or that, or fix Word —

Oh.

Hang on.

I’ve done such a short video tip every weekday this year but the other day I was so very fed up with the insanity of Microsoft Word that I posted a video demonstrating how to fix every one of its problems. Doesn’t matter if it’s that when you type a single apostrophe, it enters a comma instead. Doesn’t matter if you italicise a word and instead Word reformats the paragraph so that it’s justified right, ragged left.

No, whatever your Microsoft Word problem is, that video of mine showed the solution. It’s a video of clicking on the File menu, then choosing Quit.

I do that, then I’m banned. Coincidence? I think so, yes.

It’d be good to have that kind of impact, to know that the searing strength of my tiny gag upset the apple cart, or the Windows cart, and that I had to be silenced with an unsanctioned hit against my TikTok account.

Actually, I do remember a Microsoft PR person once saying I’d made them cry. Don’t imagine I’m proud of this, but they’d sent me a review copy of some version of Word and I sent them back a couple of pages reporting on what wasn’t working. It was shocking. This app was about to ship and key features that Microsoft was promoting simply did not work. I’m sorry I ruined the PR person’s day, but I suspect the tears were frustration that they knew Microsoft wouldn’t do anything.

As they would have well known, Microsoft logic is this: is there a feature called X? Yes. Does it work? Who cares?

You think I’m exaggerating but I can give you specific examples where Microsoft pretended to add a feature to Word solely so that corporate buyers would see it on the checklist and buy the app. Anyway, that version of Word shipped as planned, and it was roundly panned.

But maybe it was what set me down this road to becoming the exciting, unpredictable menace that I’ve become. Maybe it was this that means TikTok is scared of me.

Or it’s another bug and anyway, it feels so long ago now that social media was actually interesting.

Stave off repetition

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Only this week, someone compared my piano playing to that of Rachmaninoff’s. To be precise, they said: “He’s not as good as Rachmaninoff.”

Sorry, that’s such an old joke. But then my desire to learn piano is just about as prehistoric. Right now, talking to you, I am 481 days into Duolingo Piano, about six days into the substantially better Simply Piano app, a couple of months into a friend’s books on piano playing — and four lessons into the real thing with an actual piano teacher which is the most frightening thing of them all.

Think of the best piano player you can, and then go listen to him or her. Think of the worst, and now we’re talking my level. That’s obviously not to insult my teacher, I am only four half-hour lessons in and even now, I mean this moment, I am writing to you instead of practicing. I know so little that I don’t even have a grasp of how much it is that I don’t know. And then I can play even less, and then I can play that even less consistently than you’d hope.

But in a minute, I will go practice. I will go annoy the neighbours. And for the short time I’ve got to do that in just now, there will be nothing else in my head but music. It is fantastic to spend the rest of the morning with the music in your head being what you’ve played, or at least tried to play. It’s the practice time that is why I’m doing this, though, apart from how I just relish piano music, it’s the time doing something totally occupying. Totally occupying and different to everything else I do.

I get to do a lot of things I excessively enjoy but I’m conscious every week that there are these 30 or so that must be done and so always are, and then the week is over. Next thing you know, the month is gone, the year is passing, all of that. Even the piano doesn’t take me away entirely since at present I’m very conscious that next Tuesday evening and the next lesson is coming, plus if I ever get any good at it, part of the whole point is playing in time.

But then I didn’t have time for this, and you’re the same, you don’t have time for something until you’re doing it and somehow you do. I think I’ve been coasting, too, doing things I’ve done before and believe with only minimal evidence that I’m good at. I am so not good at playing piano, yet I can see what seems to me to be enormous improvement.

My teacher doesn’t see it, not so much.

Still, it’s exciting to be at the start of learning something.

At a Crossroads

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This is on my mind. Some many years ago now, I was at a story meeting for ITV’s revival of Crossroads at the network’s Lenton Lane offices in Nottingham. I was so nervous beforehand that I threw up in the car park. The one man I even distantly knew was weirdly keen on asking what I thought of some firemen in their uniforms nearby. Apparently I didn’t give the response he wanted because when we then went inside and sat at a huge square table, he made a point of sitting at the opposite end where I was supposed to see him refusing to look at me.

I didn’t notice. I don’t seem to have noticed much that day, but all of this is on my mind again now, talking to you, because of something I did notice. I think there were fifteen of us at that table, maybe thirteen writers, definitely one producer and I think I remember one script editor. Twelve of the thirteen writers were old hands, they saw this meeting as a chore they had to tick off in order to get paid, and I was just glad to be not throwing up again.

Except that’s not quite true. There was one more thing I was glad about and it was to do with this business of them finding it a chore. Whether they meant it or whether they were trying to look good amongst their group, every writer there but me was sullen, superior, annoyed at their job, and talking only about the money. They were superior to me as writers, but they did not want to be writers, at least not on that show, and they acted as if this career were the dullest thing in the world. Certainly they acted as if it were beneath them.

This was writing. On a television series. Granted, not the best series in the world, and actually it was never going to be the best writing either because of how staggeringly prescriptive the work was. We were each given a scene breakdown, literally every scene in our episode, in order, with details on each one. In retrospect it was like the job was colouring in. I took it very seriously and actually managed to argue my way into having two of the scenes reversed in the sequence because they so clearly played off each other dramatically better.

That’s what I thought then and of course I can’t remember the details now. Today I suspect the producer let me win that switch because she didn’t care. If it didn’t work, she’d just reverse it back in the edit.

But for all that I was a weak writer on a first go in this form, I was excited and truly everyone else was not.

Earlier this week, I was asked if I still get excited by writing projects when I’ve been doing this a long time. I nodded so vigorously that my jaw slapped the table. That was partly because it was the straight truthful answer, but also because in mid-slap I realised that all these years of writing later, I still haven’t become as jaded as those Crossroads writers.

That’s nice for me. But actually, yes, that is nice for me. Not twenty minutes ago, I found out a fact I’ve wondered about for more than my entire time writing as a career. If I don’t tell you what it is, it is really because it is the smallest thing imaginable, it’s to do with single words on a project, but I found out what was behind this tiny, tiny, tiny moment and I am dancing because of it.

I’ve been through some very bad times as a writer — and I got fired off Crossroads — and to my mind I’m still just starting out, but you get to dance. Don’t let this ever end.

Mono a mono

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Self Distract: Mono a mono

This is: idiotic mistake + time = deeply useful.

While this is actually about something that happened this week, I need you to first come back with me to a Saturday sometime in the late 1980s, possibly early 1990s. John Platt’s “Saturday Gold” show is on BBC Radio WM and it’s a music programme, specifically playing 60s hits and playing them for two hours out across every local BBC Radio station in the Midlands.

After perhaps ten minutes, calls start coming in. There’s something wrong. All these great 1960s stereo hits are being played as mono and you didn’t need to be an audiophile to spot it, because they were only coming out from the left speaker on people’s radios. At the time, especially since the whole problem vanished around eleven minutes into the show, the politely received wisdom was that there must’ve been a transmitter fault.

Nobody really believed that. Everybody knew it was my fault.

“Saturday Gold” was pre-recorded because it was presented by the producer of the immediately preceding show, “Sport on Saturday”. He probably would stick around but that sport show was a marathon, it was better for him to do the show in advance and just have someone play out the tape.

Hello. I was that someone. I also worked on “Sport on Saturday” but in a minor role, it was easy to have me carry on and those two hours were my favourite in the whole week. Because once you started the tape running at the right time, you could sit there in the studio talking. Relaxing.

Except this one time when I forgot to do something important.

You’ve seen radio desks with their faders for turning the sound up or down, on or off. Atop each fader there would also be a pot, a little dial, that controlled the stereo balance. I don’t really know why you’d want to fiddle with this, but if you did, you could nudge one channel — a presenter, a music tape — a little to the left or right of the stereo sound and get a subtle spread of audio.

Or all the way to the left or right, in which case you got mono out of one speaker.

I don’t know why you’d make small, sensible adjustments, but I do know why I whacked one fader all the way to the left and another all the way to the right. My minor job on the sports show was to record the commentary coming in from various football grounds. I had to have a tape running all the time, recording everything from those grounds, and when there was anything significant like a goal or something, mark where that was on the tape. Then at various times, stop that tape, set another one recording in its place, and clip out the commentary about the goal.

It’s quite hard to listen to multiple commentaries, but fortunately there were usually only two at a time. So you’re ahead of me now, yes. I’d have the feeds from the ground playing quite loudly, but stereo-shifted so that I was hearing one commentator from the speaker on my left, the other from the speaker on my right.

Since the commentary was always mono, nobody knew I did this nor would’ve had any reason to criticise if they saw me. I expect I was actually instructed to do it.

You know the rest. This one Saturday, I forgot to turn the channels back from fully left or fully right to where they were supposed to be. Which means that Saturday’s 60s music show went out only on the left channel. And right now, talking to you, I realise that the following morning’s breakfast show would have only gone out on the right channel. I’m suddenly feeling both pale and red-faced.

Flash forward an extremely, extremely long time, to earlier on this week. I’m producing a podcast recording and there’s a problem. One part of the recording of this two-hour thing didn’t work. There was only my side and the backup recording, a single stereo audio file that contained the audio from both presenters.

So you could just play out that stereo file. But the levels were wrong: one presenter sounded much quieter than the other. That same presenter, okay, it was me, also coughed very badly a few times through it. When you have two tracks, you just need to clip out the cough, all’s fine.

Back at BBC Radio WM, I had that pot at the top of the fader, and I had actual tape that I would clip out with a razor blade. In my office earlier this week, I had Logic Pro on my Mac, and these digital audio files of my voice track and this stereo mix.

Yep. I duplicated the track, made sure they were synced up, and I whacked one of them over to the left, one of them over to the right. I could then adjust the levels to match, and I did have to also fiddle a little later with the final output, but I had a clean recording of me with my cough and the other presenter without it. Edited the whole thing, sent it out, done.

But the sole reason I could even imagine that solution today was the mistake I made all those years ago.

You won’t tell anyone at BBC Radio what I did, right?

Not my type

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I have no problem with calling a helpline from where I am in England and getting support from a woman in India. I might think about global supply chains, I might think about outsourcing and minimum wage, but I need to know something and she knows it, I can’t conceive of having a problem with her. And yet you know people do, because sometimes a support person like this will pretend to be in England and so talk about the weather. Or will insist that her name is Jeffrey.

When that happens, I feel embarrassed for my species. It’s like when you see a warning label that says your coffee may be hot: you know this fatuously obvious thing is there because some arsehole sued and probably won. So you also know that Jeffrey has had a bad time with callers from England and this weather chat stops some of it. Or when you — admittedly rarely now — get to meet someone in person like a hotel receptionist, there’s a decent chance that their nametag is wrong. They may well have just grabbed whatever name tag was on the desk and, again, you know that’s because there have been problems with customers before.

You can’t fault preventative measures, you can only lament a world in which such things are necessary.

But this is not necessary. Yesterday I had to use a chatbot to get a thing done and it was fine, it worked quickly, did the job, I was on and gone in under five minutes. Yet the majority of those five were spent waiting while this AI chatbot pretended to be human. You click the “Yes of bloody course I want a refund” and you get those Messages-style three dots showing the chatbot is thinking, then the reply “Are you sure you wouldn’t just like us to look after the money for you?” gets typed out as slowly as if by a one-finger typist.

You know there’s a lot of money behind that chatbot, you know there’s AI involved so the company has paid more than it needed to, and you also know that this pretend one-finger typist has replaced very many actual one-finger typists.

And then if you do the same thing but phoning up instead of typing in, you will now typically get a synthesised voice pausing while the sound effect of typing is played to you.

I don’t know when we became infants.